Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

“I think that maybe we do not climb a mountain because it is there. We climb it because we are here.”
Jon Carroll

One of my favourite travel writers mentions in several of his books that when you travel you need a mission (or two) to make your time abroad worthwhile. Of course there are those with epic missions, such as the book I have just come across in which a man, just before his 70th birthday, draws a line on a European map between Le Havre and Rome and walks 1100 miles in 71 walking days as a kind of homage to the traditional pilgrimage or the armchair-travelling author of Julie & Julia who decides to make it her mission to attempt every recipe in Julia Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

My missions for my time abroad tend to be a little bit more simple. I guess you could divide them up into the places I want to go and then the things I want to do while I am there.

I have four universal missions that I intend to accomplish in each place I travel. Those are:

• In each country I visit I will attend a cooking class in the local cuisine;
• Visit the highest point in each city or town visited;
• Make sure that I experience at least one cliché of the country that I am visiting;
• Record my travels both on this blog and also in a personal journal.

There are also several missions which are related to the places I intend on visiting:

• England (visit the places where Dad grew up and also where Mum lived during her OE; make my journey to River Cottage and meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall)
• Spain (visit Gaudi’s architecture in Barcelona)
• Italy (use the only phrase I still remember when I attempted to learn the language during my brief obsession with Italy when I was 14 – “Ci è stato un incidente” ( or “There has been an accident”))
• Morocco (ride a camel into the Sahara)

I’m sure more missions will come, the more reading I do and the more people I talk to… but this is probably enough to begin with!!!